


february

by softestbutch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (not explicitly but im autistic and i wrote this and i said so), Autistic!Doctor, Dancing, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, References to Depression, Snow Day, Snowball Fight, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, man this is just so soft, this is a fic about liminal spaces and snow and lesbians and i love it deeply i hope you will too, yaz just loves her so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:09:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29540775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestbutch/pseuds/softestbutch
Summary: The Doctor stepped a little closer, still partially obscured from view, still animated in the quiet orange glow.‘Oh, it’s a little silly,’ she said. Yaz raised an eyebrow for her to continue. ‘I can go,’ she said, and Yaz breathed an endeared laugh.‘What is it, Doctor?’ she asked.A pause. ‘It’s snowing,’ the Doctor said.in short: the doctor is incredibly excited about the snow, and yaz is incredibly in love with her.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 18
Kudos: 45





	february

It was February.

It was the first of February, in fact.

This fact wouldn’t have seemed so notable to Yaz, had January not felt so endless. Having time at home was good, and right, and grounding. Ryan had assured her of that, in a quiet moment during one of their hologram calls when the Doctor had popped out to replenish her sugary tea. But it also took adjustment. There were moments when it felt bleak. So entering February, in some ways, had felt like a small victory - a reassurance that time kept chugging along, even when Yaz was placed back inside it and was sometimes unsure it was something she ever wanted again. A new month represented progress.

February, too, felt suffocating. That was nothing new. It was part of the ebb and flow of the year - or had been, back when she was a little more earthbound - and she knew, as always, that it would come to an end eventually. So as the world entered February, she was happy to remain in bed, curled up and facing away from reminders of anything outside of the faint light of her bedroom.

Soon, the days would get longer. Grey would become a little greener, birdsong a little louder. The thought of that light got Yaz through even the darkest of the winter gloom, both in and outside of her head.

For now, though, it was snowing.

It started softly, silently, with Yaz’s back to the window as she read by faint orange lamplight. It was unobserved as it graced the early hours - nothing but a faint dusting in the quiet. She only registered it when she heard the wind pick up enough to warrant a glance over her shoulder. She wished she’d felt the wonder, in that moment, that punctuated every snowy childhood winter, but that was one of the things she’d lost along the way to her rocky young adulthood. She yawned, and turned the page.

The wind increased. Then it increased again. She placed her open book face down beside her pillow and was on the way to check the window wasn’t ajar, when the swirling wind made way for a faint blue light flowing into her room. It hesitated, then bloomed again, cycling back and forth as the whooshing neared its crescendo.

Yaz exhaled, and a solemn sort of smile spread across her face. She closed her eyes to focus on the sound, as loose pieces of hair were lifted gently into the air around her face, and a staticky warmth took hold in her chest. She skimmed the surface of the memory of a similar time, allowing the faint sense of that desperation, longing and fury to wash over her, to undulate and dissipate just like that familiar noise.

 _‘Please,’_ she remembered saying. _‘Please be her.’_

‘Yaz?’ came a whisper.

The TARDIS stood at the foot of her bed, pressed quite skilfully into the small available nook. A crack between the doors allowed golden light to spill out into the small room, bouncing off the walls to envelop Yaz in its warm glow. And then, peering around them, was the Doctor.

Yaz gave her the softest of smiles from beneath her blankets. The Doctor returned it, bigger, brighter.

‘Are you awake?’ she whispered.

Yaz laughed, feather-light. ‘Yes.’

The Doctor smiled again. She didn’t move from her awkward position behind the ship’s door, rocking a little on her heels, looking at the ground after a few seconds’ eye contact with Yaz.

‘I weren’t expecting you till Sunday,’ Yaz said quietly, and the Doctor looked suddenly dismayed.

‘It’s okay!’ Yaz continued with a smile. ‘I’m happy to see you.’

The Doctor looked at her for a second, before fixing her eyes on the floor again, hands around her braces, looking, for want of a better word, bashful.

‘I’m happy to see you, too,’ she said. Yaz felt a glow spreading outwards from her chest, or perhaps her cheeks. Smiling at her lap, it took a second for her question to even occur to her.

‘So,’ she began, an upturned question in the tone. When the Doctor didn’t pick up on it, she continued. ‘What’s up?’

The Doctor stepped a little closer, still partially obscured from view, still animated in the quiet orange glow.

‘Oh, it’s a little silly,’ she said. Yaz raised an eyebrow for her to continue. ‘I can go,’ she continued, and Yaz breathed an endeared laugh.

‘What is it, Doctor?’ she asked.

A pause. ‘It’s snowing,’ the Doctor said. 

Yaz sat up, and looked to the window. The dusting was beginning to settle. It fell unimpeded into the night, no cars, no people to witness the light swirls dancing under the orange street lamps. She looked over her shoulder at the Doctor, who was swaying slightly, hands in her pockets. She held a hand out, an invitation, and the Doctor joined her at the window.

‘It’s a proper pretty view, Yaz,’ she said into the quiet, and, in response, Yaz wrapped an arm gently around the Doctor’s.

‘Yeah,’ she breathed, ‘it is.’

Yaz closed her eyes, smiling in the darkness. The Doctor squeezed her arm a little.

‘Y’like the snow, Doctor?’ she asked after a while.

‘Love it,’ the Doctor said. ‘Y’know, surprisingly few planets have the atmosphere for this kind of thing.’ Yaz rested her head into her shoulder, smiling at the prospect of a winding trip around the universe via one of the Doctor’s long infodumps.

‘Human colonists are always trying to recreate it, but they’ve never quite matched the real deal.’ They both followed a particularly heavy flake that, seemingly straying from its course, meandered right up to Yaz’s window before settling on the sill.

‘By the time your lot have established themselves among the stars, you’re playing with liquified diamond rain, bathing by the liquid methane geysers, but… snow,’ she trailed a finger across the window. She was quiet, then, and Yaz thought she might have finished her sentence. But then, ‘it’s just very planet Earth.’

Yaz moved to face the Doctor, tucking her hair behind her ear to better expose her face. 

Her hand lingered, as she asked, ‘do you want to go outside?’

The Doctor’s face scrunched up into one of her beaming smiles, and she didn’t need to answer. Instead, she skipped at speed back towards the TARDIS, emerging moments later with a selection of knitwear in tow. She’d definitely already prepared it. Yaz laughed softly, taking her own dusky lavender scarf from her wardrobe and wrapping it around her neck. She pulled her coat over her pyjamas - a key sensation in her memories of childhood excitement - and pocketed some grey gloves.

‘Is this why you came?’ she asked as she guided the Doctor through the dark landing, practically tiptoeing.

‘Got an alert on,’ she stage-whispered. ‘In the TARDIS.’ She flashed Yaz an embarrassed little smile, and Yaz only felt more endeared. She pictured the Doctor engineering that childlike glee of waking up to a night’s worth of snow into the very functions of her ship. Probably wearing her goggles. Definitely acting on a late night impulse. And absolutely smiling through it all.

Yaz smiled. ‘Why come here though,’ she asked her, ‘if you want snow? I mean, I think the Arctic’s got plenty to spare.’

She looked over her shoulder, and the Doctor looked shyly back at her with a delightful half-smile. She opened her mouth to speak, but then Yaz was jolted from their little bubble as a loud crash punctured the silence.

The Doctor screamed, tripping forwards with no small measure of flailing. Yaz registered them then - the stacked boxes of suspicious pots and pans, sat outside the kitchen door, left as part of her Dad’s ongoing investigations into the apparently conspiratorial kitchenware company that had opened up shop in town. The Doctor fell, the boxes tipped, and each sharp clang seemed only to lead to two or three more.

Acting quickly, Yaz caught the Doctor, grabbing under her armpits without grace and hoisting her back to standing before she could hit the floor. In the immediate aftermath of the noise, she simply held her steady against herself. She couldn’t have said how long they stood in the landing, arms wrapped around one another, before Yaz started laughing.

‘What are you laughing at?’ the Doctor whispered, her mock offence betrayed by her badly disguised grin. ‘That were the fright of my life!’

Upon hearing the creaks of movement in her parents’ room, and a groan from Sonya’s, Yaz let go of the Doctor in favour of grabbing her hand and bolting for the front door.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she grinned, and the door clicked closed behind them.

The Doctor was silent when they finally reached ground level. She’d let Yaz know that she didn’t want to see the snow until she set foot in it, and she smiled at her dedication to that first magical moment. She’d followed her as she walked quickly along the corridor, holding a hand up to obscure her vision to the left and holding Yaz’s with the other. When they’d taken the lift, Yaz had taken both of the Doctor’s hands, and encouraged her to focus her attention entirely on her to avoid any sneak peeks through the glass. She still felt as though she were glowing when they reached the ground. It was as if her heart had remained in that moment behind the glass, and was now travelling upwards, upwards, beyond the scope of even the tallest tips of the Sheffield skyline.

But now they were by the doors, and Yaz stepped aside to allow the Doctor to take the first step. The Doctor protested, insisting instead on taking her hand, and they shared the sweetest smile as they both felt the simultaneous _crunch_ of their boots in the snow. They breathed in, Yaz still giddy with the eye contact, and seemed to each anticipate the other saying something. After a moment, the Doctor filled the quiet with an excitable little laugh, and slipped her hand from Yaz’s so she could take off and jog a little meandering path in the untouched snow.

She twirled on the spot and looked up at the inky sky, snowflakes settling gently on the outstretched arms of her coat, catching in her hair and on the flush of pink at the tip of her nose.

‘Look at it!’ the Doctor said breathlessly. Her words were brief, but Yaz got the sense of so much more than what had been communicated verbally. As she watched her beaming under the warm streetlight, she felt her rushing excitement as though it were her own. When she finally moved to get closer to her, Yaz found herself smiling down at the marvel of her own footprints, as though the Doctor’s wonder were taking root in her own chest.

The Doctor busied herself drawing patterns in the snow with the indents her boots left, and Yaz took a moment to look up at her home behind them. She saw the light click off in the window by the landing - her Dad must have finally been satisfied that there wasn’t an intruder after the Doctor’s little fall. That, or her Mum’s angered grumbling at the unwanted light had reached a crescendo epic enough for him to decide the best course of action was to shelve his conspiracy.

With the light off, the block was once again illuminated only by the limited radiuses of the dim streetlamps, and the pale moonlight reflected back into the sky by the snow. She might have interpreted the quiet as ghostly, but, hearing the Doctor’s soft giggling from behind her, it felt instead like something liminal. It felt as though the world were on pause, silent in sleep, as the snowfall immortalised this moment without witness. With the Doctor she often felt timeless, but it felt like a different form of wonder to stand together in this unseen moment in the space outside her own home. The universe felt smaller, and she felt the two of them were untouchable.

She remembered another moment like this, for a second. She remembered silent snowfall and a brief brush with untouchability. She shook it away. February always did this to her.

‘Yaz!’ the Doctor called, and Yaz felt the sadness that had been encroaching upon her crack apart and dissipate into the flurry upon hearing her voice. She turned.

‘I made a snow fam!’

The Doctor was gesturing wildly at four little piles of snow. Her animated grin as she paced around them seemed enough, almost, to transfer some semblance of Frankensteinish life into the snow itself. The piles, Yaz noticed as she got a little closer, weren’t entirely formless - the screaming one she immediately recognised as Graham, and beside him, Ryan had what she thought was a little snow beanie. A little off to the right was the Doctor, stripy details etched into her shirt, and Yaz, with two little snowballs atop her head. She tried not to think about the breach in between the two pairs - or how it made her feel that she was pictured so snugly on the Doctor’s side.

‘Are those space buns?’ Yaz asked after a second, and the Doctor’s face seemed only to light up further, glowing pink against the snow.

‘Is that what you call them?’ she beamed. ‘They’re brilliant. My favourite of your hairstyles, and you have some crackers. And they’re named after space, too?!’

Yaz laughed. In her pockets, she fiddled with a little piece of string.

‘Funny,’ the Doctor said, her back to Yaz now as she neatened up a collapsing section of Ryan, ‘I always thought of them as very Earth buns.’ There was a moment of quiet as the Doctor worked. ‘They remind me of here. Of tea, at yours. I loved that day.’

‘I loved it too,’ Yaz said, and it was probably too quiet for the Doctor to hear.

Yaz walked a little closer, and found herself studying the Doctor’s hands as she made some final adjustments, neatening the hem on Ryan’s beanie. Her fingertips were a screaming shade of red, and it took a moment for a thought forming at the back of her mind to occur to her properly.

‘Doctor, where are your gloves?’ she asked suddenly. The Doctor, perhaps in surprise, drew her hands quickly away, and Yaz stopped herself from reaching right out for them.

‘Oh yeah!’ the Doctor said, hurriedly patting down her coat, ‘forgot.’ 

She produced, from several different pockets, the various knitted accessories Yaz had seen her grab from the TARDIS. Yaz wondered briefly how she was able to fit so much in that coat. She was slinging a deep blue scarf around her neck - it was the one with the rainbow details that she’d worn that first New Year they’d spent together. Or, rather, the first twenty of them. That was time travel for you. Yaz sighed faintly. New Year was a sore subject since the last one passed her by. Still, she was adjusting back to a life she actively participated in, and that scarf reminded her of happy things too. In the snowy night, she could almost feel the warmth of the Doctor close to her as they watched the fireworks.

‘Oh, it’s been ages!’ the Doctor was saying, seemingly directed towards a beanie, before pulling it over her snow-scattered hair. It was oversized, leaving only a fraction of her blonde visible, and was blue and white, coming close to matching somewhat with the scarf, but still providing enough of a clash to remain undoubtedly the Doctor. Her gloves, breaking from the emerging TARDIS blue theme, wore the gaudiest rainbow stripes Yaz had ever seen, and she laughed as the Doctor pulled them from her pocket, unsure why she’d ever imagined they’d be anything else.

‘Are you laughing at me?’ the Doctor said, examining her gloved hand. She gazed, perplexed, at her fingers, which were all jumbled up in the wrong holes.

‘Come here,’ Yaz said with a soft laugh, and offered her hands to the Doctor, who hesitantly allowed the help.

‘Bit numb, is all,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Yaz said, removing the glove and catching the Doctor's fingers briefly between hers. She started when her mind caught up to the intimacy she was displaying, and quickly began to rub their hands together to generate some heat. She stole a quick glance upwards and found the Doctor studying their joined hands. It felt exposing.

'So,' Yaz said, eager to move on from the intense quiet, 'no more building snowmen without adequate protection.' She pulled one colourful glove over the Doctor's hand, and then the other. The Doctor wiggled her fingers with a grin, sensation presumably returning.

'Course, Yaz,' she said with cheeky tunefulness, and, before Yaz could react, she took her gloved hand in hers and raised it to place a gentlemanly kiss on her knuckles.

'You're the boss.'

Then the Doctor was skipping away again, her scarf blowing gently in the wind, and Yaz felt rooted to the spot. As she stood, snowflakes accumulating on her static frame, her mind was consumed by thoughts on a loop. _You're the boss_ \- words that certainly shouldn't have ignited something in her gut. The Doctor's hands - calloused, strong and dexterous - and yet accepting tender touch from her. And that kiss. A misplaced gesture, an odd little 'thank you'. And yet the thought felt magnetic, the image consuming. She cursed the woollen barrier that had prevented her from feeling those soft lips against her skin.

The Doctor took to drawing patterns on the bonnets of cars, and Yaz, shaking her previous train of thought away with a smile, took a moment to look out absently over her sleeping city. The falling snow gave the city lights a pleasant twinkling quality. It made them feel distant, perhaps a little dreamlike. It was helpful to view her hometown in a slightly more faraway light. Her relationship with it was troubled, after all.

She hated the slow Sheffield winters. She hated the dark, and the cold, and the long stretches of time indoors. Time to herself meant time to think.

The winter she’d spent without the Doctor had been the worst of all. That winter was endless. Daylight was rare, substituted for the harsh glare of the TARDIS she’d based herself in. She thought it’d bring her closer to the Doctor. Instead, it just made her absence more palpable. Things had felt hopeless. But then the Doctor had returned. She disconnected a little from Earth time during the breakneck tour of the universe they’d embarked on as soon as they’d been reunited. Perhaps it was the Doctor herself who’d felt like spring coming early. The Doctor was spring and summer all at once, and her daylight seemed never to wane. So when Yaz had found herself becoming a little too unearthly and requested a brief stay back at home, she found it jarring to be placed back into that very same winter she’d left behind.

She’d been sure she couldn’t have coped with a February spent separated from the Doctor. February was when it all went wrong the first time. Those days and nights were defined by ever encroaching dusk, the cold, the wet, and the slow. That was the sheen on every memory of the day she decided she couldn’t take it. Every February that followed, her family would walk on eggshells around her. Sonya would mark it out, gently, carefully, with uncharacteristic care that made Yaz feel as much crushing guilt as she did love. During the winters, she felt like she was treated as a volatile, vulnerable thing. She hated it. She hated the winters, by extension, too. She had every intention, at one point, to never return home for a winter again. She’d travel, she decided, through an eternal summer by the Doctor’s side. She wanted a kaleidoscope of sunrises and new life and cloudless majesty. And she knew the Doctor would deliver.

But here she was, by the Doctor’s side, looking over Sheffield in the wintertime. This moment, sealed away in the night, felt like the kind of winter she could come to love. She was glad the Doctor had got her out of bed. She was glad to be outside - glad to be in the cold and the snow and the time of year she dreaded. As she watched the snow fall, she smiled to herself at the Doctor’s wonder. She loved its infectiousness. She loved her uninhibited glee, her laughter, her voice against the quiet. The paths the snowflakes took on their winding descents over the city seemed to trace out the shape of her, as though nature itself was spelling out her name. This liminal moment was so entirely hers. As Yaz looked out, she found she could think only of the Doctor.

And then it hit her.

The initial shock of the ice cold didn’t linger, but the slow dribble of melted liquid down Yaz’s neck and back incited a playful anger whose heat easily outweighed the cold. She turned to find the Doctor a short distance away, giggling to herself under the scarf partially obscuring her face.

‘Oh,’ Yaz said, shooting her a grin and adjusting her gloves, ‘you’ve really done it now.’

Yaz’s snowballs were uniform. The snow was compacted and the spheres were often near-perfect - just one of the skills a childhood with Sonya had encouraged her to develop. She was ruthless and methodical, and knew, in the end, that she wouldn’t be the one to ask for mercy. 

The Doctor’s strategy was altogether more chaotic. She moved, for one thing, in ad-hoc spirals around Yaz, who remained more or less rooted to one spot. She laughed as she gathered snow - breathless belly laughter, giddy from the exertion, with a joyous contagion that Yaz couldn’t help but fall victim to. Particularly large or carefully aimed snowballs would knock Yaz’s rhythm off kilter and create seconds of vulnerability to further attacks, and, when the Doctor concentrated, she used these wisely. More often, she fell into a frantic sort of rhythm of generating little handfuls of snow to pelt in Yaz’s general direction. When the laughter got too much, even the shaping of her snowballs would be abandoned, and she’d scatter her with something more akin to a snowy flurry.

‘Reaching your limit, Doctor?’ Yaz asked with a quirk of her eyebrow as the Doctor took a brief breather by the wall.

‘Oh, Yaz, I’m just getting started,’ she insisted, scooping the snow settled on the wall into her arms in a sweeping motion as she got back to her feet. Yaz had a snowball ready to go, and grinned at the Doctor as she tossed it back and forth between her hands.

‘It’s okay, I can go easy on you,’ she teased. The Doctor smiled at the ground, seemingly determined not to take the bait, and instead focused on preparing her ammunition.

‘No need,’ the Doctor said, brandishing her creation. She was now facing Yaz, a short distance between them, air charged with the impending standoff. She grinned, and Yaz couldn’t help but marvel at her standing there, under the glow of the streetlamp, cheeks rosy and eyes smiling. She was the very image of mischief.

‘You’re not going to win if you keep getting distracted,’ the Doctor called, and Yaz had no time to react before she punctuated it with a hefty snowball that hit her squarely on the nose. She shook the snow from her face and couldn’t help but smile, quickly beginning to laugh as the Doctor prepared herself for a quick getaway, anticipating incoming revenge.

‘I’ll make you regret that,’ she said as they both took off.

‘Only if you catch me first!’

The Doctor was agile, if a little inelegant. She took sharp turns and looped back on herself and made sure she and Yaz made a mess of footprints up and down the entire car park. The whole time, she laughed, melodic and breathless, and Yaz could think of no other way she wanted to spend this odd in-between time than chasing that laugh through the dark. When she slipped a little and took a second to regain her footing, Yaz considered allowing her the dignity of a pause. But the Doctor grinned over her shoulder as she fumbled, and it felt like a challenge. Yaz ran the distance between them and pelted a snowball sideways at the Doctor’s face, knocking her beanie off centre and sticking her hair to her cheek, compacted snow lingering even in the aftermath of the hit.

The Doctor spluttered. Painted on her face was a shock so sheer that Yaz, for a moment, feared she might be genuinely upset. So when she let out a laugh, it felt like a tender undoing of the knots in Yaz’s stomach. She laughed too. In the low light, under the powdery snowfall, surrounded by sleep and silence, the Doctor and Yaz laughed together. Soon, they were keeling over, breathless, and every glance up at the Doctor, so entirely, endearingly disheveled, would start Yaz over again. The Doctor patted some snow onto the side of Yaz’s face for the sake of levelling the field, and in truth the shock of cold barely registered when the Doctor’s gloved hand was on her cheek, running her fingers through the snow-matted hair that had fallen loose from her plait.

Yaz realised she might have been staring a bit, and allowed her expression to melt into an easy smile instead. When the Doctor grinned back at her, she flicked her nose, shooting her with tiny snowflakes that had been compacted onto her gloved fingers. They lingered only for a few seconds against the warmth of her rosy skin. The Doctor sprinkled her with fresh snow from the nearest shrubbery in retaliation, and Yaz lunged for the hefty settling on a nearby half-wall, stepping up her revenge. Then she slipped.

It all happened quickly. One foot went, and then the other, sliding fluidly along the icy layer beneath the snow. Her arms were in the air, and she let out a stifled sort of ‘oh’ as she felt herself begin to plummet.

But then there were strong arms at her back, an anchoring presence wrapped around her, and once again she was still. Yaz looked up.

She was mesmerised, for a long moment, by the image that came to her of the two of them viewed from the outside. It was intoxicatingly romantic: orange streetlight against the blue night, a flurry of snow, and, centre stage, the Doctor holding onto her. She supported her by her waist, and Yaz’s arms had found their way around the Doctor’s shoulders, one hand rooted in tangled hair up against the delicate skin at the base of her neck.

The Doctor looked at her, and it felt utterly exposing. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly open. She was still tousled in the aftermath of the winning snowball blow, and there was something quietly perfect about it all: from the mess of hair stuck fast to her flushed cheeks to the miniscule snowflakes still visible in her eyebrows and lashes, she was pure, ruffled beauty. The seconds passed, and Yaz found her gaze drawn to the Doctor’s lips as though it were an inevitability. They were flushed pink in the cold. She could see each shallow breath she took. There was something achingly intimate about watching each breath condense into a fleeting swirl. Against her body, she could feel the movement of the Doctor’s lungs, steady and ancient, and, if she concentrated, her double pulse was there too. There was a brief quirk on her lips, and Yaz had never wanted anything more than to lean up and meet them with hers.

‘May I have this dance?’ the Doctor asked softly, and it took Yaz a while to process the sound. 

Her soft smile must have indicated an affirmative, because the Doctor delicately returned Yaz to a standing position, as though their whole accidental exchange had been a dip in a dance. She continued to hold onto her, gentlemanly as she was firm, and Yaz allowed herself to be guided through the steps. They circled around the little patch of car park they’d claimed as their own, a little haphazard at times, improvising and negotiating as they went. The Doctor would twirl Yaz occasionally, her plait and scarf picking up in the gentle breeze. Often, they’d stumble, or falter, and the Doctor’s laugh in those moments was like music. The accidental symphony of their footsteps in the snow, the harmony of the Doctor’s laugh with Yaz’s, and the untouched majesty of the wind in the silent night formed the song to which they danced. Time seemed to have no hold on it - and Yaz found herself with a sense of nostalgic longing for this moment and a forward-looking excitement all at once. Perhaps that was just the Doctor. The feelings she inspired in Yaz seemed to reflect her own quality of a profundity that couldn’t be understood in linear confines. To Yaz, the Doctor was everything.

When it happened, it was wordless and inevitable. Their shared laughter still lingered in the air from a near-stumble of the Doctor’s, and when Yaz pulled her close by her coat, their exchange of smiles communicated beyond doubt that this was natural, and right, and perhaps where it would always have gone. Yaz couldn’t say who closed the gap, but what mattered was the feeling of the Doctor’s thumb stroking her cheek, and the tender sensation of pulling her beanie back into place, and the snow that settled on their noses while their lips were together. Under the falling snow, under the warm glow of streetlight, in this strange, obscure in-between time, the Doctor kissed her. Like the Doctor, like the dance, like the night, the kiss seemed to have the quality of causing time to slip into the background. Perhaps it had been happening all night. Perhaps it would be happening for the rest of their lives. It was timeless, and that also meant that it was always. When they finally broke apart, they laughed. It felt like an exhale at long last, and Yaz leaned into the Doctor, dizzy with catharsis and relief. They held onto each other for a long time.

The snow fell, and the city slept. By the morning, the footprints marking out the moments they’d shared would have dissipated into the snow cover. The morning light would drown out the streetlamps. February would begin. 

But the morning didn’t matter. The Doctor and Yaz danced, and kissed, and laughed, and knew that this time would forever be theirs. They didn’t need to say it, because it was in the trails of footprints they were leaving. It was in the snowflakes sticking to their hair. It was in the fleeting beauty of the early hours spent in an empty car park. And it was love.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on twitter - @softestbutch!


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